


there really aren't a hundred places to go

by buckstiel



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Identity Issues, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Road Trips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-17
Updated: 2014-12-17
Packaged: 2018-03-01 21:03:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2787695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SHIELD has fallen, and Natasha needs a new cover--but she doesn't have to go alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there really aren't a hundred places to go

**Author's Note:**

> For impossible-encouraged in the winter rare pair exchange! I hadn't honestly given this ship much thought until you listed it, and now I'm a little obsessed. Thank you. 
> 
> Title from "Chasing Brooklyn" by Lisa Schroeder.

The email had appeared in her inbox under an unfamiliar address, untraceable, and it was short, the kind of short that tended to flaunt its density and sit heavy in your hands. Maria reread it and reread it, keeping it marked as unread. It should have been deleted once she had had enough time to give it a sixth once-over--that was SHIELD protocol after all--but this was a @stark.com address and when the job didn’t require a security clearance, no one cared what the hell you did with your email.

_I’m going to be in New York on Wednesday. I’m sorry._

Today was Wednesday, and No-Longer-Agent Maria Hill was in her New York City office high up Stark Tower with an itch in her side that could only come from being stuck behind a desk after everything, an itch that liked to dig deeper into itself, twist into doubt. Maybe she should have followed Sharon into the CIA, but that was also possibly a terrible idea. But the desk was too still, the silence pulsing through the halls either too massive or far too thin. The ding of the elevator screamed in her ear, just behind her neck, or the other Principal Project Oversight next door was playing his music so loudly that the bass rattled the pens in their mug. There was no gun at her hip and no life-or-death surprises waiting to chomp down on her Achilles tendon--but there was an email at the top of her inbox. And it was Wednesday.

So she left. It was too much, and she shot a couple emails to her project managers and one off to Stark for good measure and she was pushing her way through the sidewalks ladened with sharp elbows until she was stuck, paused under the awning of her apartment building. It was Wednesday and the walk home only seemed to take half the time it normally did, and it was Wednesday and if only she didn’t have to wait to see what the email meant, what it meant exactly.

Natasha was sitting at her favorite corner of the sofa when she walked in. (So maybe wishes did come true, then, in more than one way.)

“You’re home early.”

“I got your email.” Maria didn’t move from the doorway except to close it behind her. “Where have you been?”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“In a minute.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, dropped the light jacket she had been carrying onto the nearby chair. It was the same one she had worn during the congressional hearings. They hadn’t yet started to pull the Triskelion from the Potomac, but they had needed to pull everything from the people they could find still staring at the smoking rubble where SHIELD once stood. Even now they hadn’t reopened the Metro stations still flooded from the river tunnels’ collapse.

The dust hadn’t had time to fall from the sky, much less try to settle--but maybe some had, for a temporary landing in her living room.

“Maria…” And Natasha was standing in front of her now, and there had been no hope to hear her with the carpeted floors, and those green, green eyes were staring at her with the same density of that damn email, the heaviness, but still soft. “I had to go sort some things out after my part of the hearings. And quickly.”

“Are they sorted out?”

“A bit.” Natasha tucked a stray lock of hair behind Maria’s ear, her hand lingering. “The first parts, anyway.”

She leaned into the heat of her palm, as if she could lean hard enough to keep her there, behind the locked door and drawn curtains because she knew what was coming--”You have to leave again.” It wasn’t a question.

“I blew all my covers. I need to figure out a new one.” It sounded rehearsed. It sounded like she’d already had to say it too many times.

“So ‘Natasha Romanoff’ _is_ a cover?”

She smirked briefly, her thumb lightly stroking Maria’s cheek, and they stepped closer to each other, away from the door. Red hair like the north end of a magnet, tugging. “You’ve read my file.”

“And you’ve read mine.”

“Wait...is _that_ what the kids are calling it these days?”

_You’re such a dork_. Maria’s lips pursed into a grin before pushing her the last two steps into the wall to kiss her, weaving her hands through the fire and back again. “I was worried...about you,” she murmured between kisses, and suddenly she was whirled around, slammed back into the wall herself, and Natasha was tracing a line from ear to collarbone with her mouth. “What’s left of us...underground,” she gasped. “So many--lower clearance--are--they’re-- _god_.” She hadn’t noticed Natasha’s creeping hands until the cold tips of her fingers slid lightly along the skin of her lower back. “They’re saying you’re Hydra--”

“Maria--”

“So I may have locked up their computers with an otherwise harmless virus.”

Natasha paused, one hand already crawled up under Maria’s bra strap. She wouldn’t look at Maria and, catching her breath, Maria wondered if she should have just kept it to herself. But Natasha turned back, her hands now gripping the sides of Maria’s face so tightly as if she were afraid that Maria was going to float away until there wasn’t even someone she could see to reach for.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Natasha didn’t loosen her grip and her eyes appeared to strain with the effort of not blinking, of absorbing every bit of light from Maria until her face would be stained in negative in the backs of her eyelids. That image could stay long enough to still see her every day they would be apart.

How long that would have to be--it was a rope so long neither of them wanted to grasp it yet.

“What’s going on, Nat?” she whispered.

“I’m coming back. Please don’t think I’m not coming back.”

Maria placed her hand over Natasha’s, the one still gripping at her with the tips of her fingers pressing across Maria’s cheekbones so she could learn to find her face in the dark.

“I always knew you would.”

But something hadn’t clicked into place. Natasha would leave and Maria would stay, would do yoga and catch up on the DVR and cook pasta for dinner and go back to Stark Tower and its neverending slew of emails and petty frustrations--and the crook of the question mark that would signify Natasha would wrap around her neck. Not tight enough to hurt, but enough to know. A reminder, that careful pressure on the throat. Maybe there was a name for it that she had blotted out in SHIELD Academy or stepped on in the field.

Fear. Worry. Minor blips that had called action forth now seeking paralytic revenge long past due.

“Is this something you need to do alone?”

Natasha squinted. Frowned. Buried both as quickly as they came.

“Can I come with you?”

“Maria.”

“Tell me to stay and I’ll stay, I respect that, but--”

“You still have a life here, the apartment, the job with Tony--”

“Fuck Stark.”

Tipping her head back, Natasha let out a laugh, nearly surprised at how deep it fell in her chest, and Maria lightly mouthed at her exposed neck. “It does make more sense to find a new cover with you, doesn’t it…”

“Is that a yes, then?”

 

It was.

* * *

 

Seven hours of interstates and backroads straining with Top 40 and silence, everything in between and some things they couldn’t put on the spectrum--they landed in the fourth Silver Diner they saw in the sprawling suburbia south of Washington.

It was 7 pm and packed with children in rec-league sports uniforms, and there’s a fifteen-minute wait, is that all right? Romans, party of two. Natasha’s vowels took on a thin Boston quality, a little louder than normal. This was the first stop. The first time. Try someone else on, she’d said. Learn how to slip into a new person like a sweater. Nothing but a layer.

Nancy Romans and Marcia Hall are from Wellesley, Massachusetts. Nancy is trying to become a vegetarian and always loses the _cah_ keys. Marcia coos at every dog she sees and starts saying “y’all” when Nancy gets too loud, and Nancy hates it. Marcia is shyer about PDA but still doesn’t mind when Nancy tips her chin up for a quick peck.

The booths are shiny vinyl and the miniature jukebox stands patiently by the window, waiting for the change in their pockets to be dug out and slipped in the slot--but Nancy forgot her wallet in the car, and Marcia is always the one muttering something about not having any cash. The jukebox stays silent, and the vague impressions of basslines drift over from the surrounding tables.

When the hostess leaves them with their menus, it’s not entirely clear if it’s Maria or Marcia smirking over the top of the laminated edges. Nancy raises her eyebrows. “They have more than one thing that’s vegan, hun, can ya believe it?” she says, just loud enough to make the elderly woman at the table across the way briefly break eye contact with her granddaughter.

The meal is uneventful. Marcia only has to say “y’all” once to make Nancy drop the decibels to a proper level.

“Can ya believe that we’ve been shacked up north for fifteen years and she still won’t let go of that dreadful Carolina twang?” she says to the waitress when the check comes.

“It’s one word, Nan,” Marcia sighs, rolling her eyes.

“Well it _should_ be two. Thank you,” she nods to the waitress--Jan, was it?--before turning back to Marcia. “Well, we have a long ways to go yet. Let’s get going.”

* * *

 

By nightfall they had made it all the way to Danville, stopping at a cheap motel and paying cash for a top-floor room with roof access from the window if they jumped hard enough. Marcia and Nancy had stayed in Springfield, bits and pieces of them peeling off and flying through the windows as Natasha steered them down to cut through the parkway to pick up 29 South. Neither of them had reached for the radio knob and they let the loud rush from the air tangling their hair fill the gaps of conversation.

“Is that the gist of it?” Maria had asked when they were passing through Culpeper. “Trying on people until one sticks?”

She had taken her hair out of Marcia’s thick braid but it was still pulled back into a ponytail, loosened by the wind. Flyaways framed her face, reached past boundaries and lined her nose, got into her eyes when she turned to look at Natasha, tried to make eye contact. The traffic was light and the road was long and straight so she could risk taking her eyes off the road. Just a moment, she had thought--but with the messiness, the earnest questioning against that backdrop of rolling country hills and the inky starts of a sunset, it would have to be two moments. Three moments. The road was long and straight, she reminded herself, so there could be four moments. Four moments to soak in the Maria Hill only she had the enormous privilege to see, soft around the edges and fanning the warmth creeping up Natasha’s neck.

“Well.” She finally turned back to the road. “Technically that was a warm-up.” In her peripheral vision she watched Maria attempt to pull the escaped strands of hair still against her head, away from the wind and once she gave up, Natasha reached for her hand. “But you’ve got the right idea.”

At the motel, Natasha watched her carefully pull a tank top and pair of sweatpants from her bag and realized they hadn’t said a word to each other since Culpeper. Even the decision to stop for the night instead of barrelling through the border to North Carolina had been communicated through a nod and a shrug.

“Are you okay, Maria?” she asked suddenly.

Maria stopped in the doorway of the bathroom. “Yeah, I’m just tired. Gonna take a shower. You wanna…?”

“You go ahead.”

Five minutes later, Maria was sitting on the end of the bed beside her, and Natasha watched her dry one section of her hair at a time. It wasn’t something she used to do, not before. “Where are we going tomorrow?” she asked quietly, still drying, still staring at her knees. “Is there a plan to all this?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Does it matter?”

She lay in bed that night with Maria’s back against her stomach and her nose nestled in her dark hair that spread wide in a curving fan along the pillow turned grey in the shadows. By morning Maria had turned over, her arms latched around Natasha’s shoulders and her hair splayed across Natasha’s face in a way that made her think it was still night when she first woke.

“Let’s go to Georgia,” Maria murmured into her collarbone. “I have an idea.”

* * *

 

Madison and Nora Smith are fraternal twin sisters but they still cut their dark brown hair the same way because after all, they’re still twins even if their faces don’t mirror each other, and old Mrs. Frost thinks that’s just the most _darlin’_ thing she’s ever seen.

“I’m not in the house all that much nowadays,” Mrs. Frost says as she shuffles down the hall. “But I do still rent it out during the Master’s as you know--y’all wouldn’t be here otherwise, now would you?” The Smith sisters are golf fanatics, played throughout high school and college, and now they have tickets to see the real deal at Augusta National, and this house is gorgeous and right down the street from the action. “Much better than fightin’ all that traffic on Washington Road, now,” Mrs. Frost had said when they arrived. “You could walk there. And I could avoid the mess altogether,” she had added with a whisper and a wink.

The hardwood floors are polished and treated so they shine extra bright under the natural light from the back windows, and Mrs. Frost pointedly doesn’t look at an old leather armchair in the corner whose cushions are flattened in a particular way. Nora takes pause at the bookshelves behind the chair, shelves that are filled more with pictures of grandchildren than books. “You’ve got a real cute family, ma’am.” Nora’s voice is thick with the hot summers of Mississippi, the way her throat tucks around the r’s. “How many grandkids?”

“Eight. Plus six great-grandchildren.”

“That’s wonderful,” Madison says with a grin. “We’ve got a small family, ourselves. There’s only what, Nora? Two more grandkids besides us on either side?”

“Sounds about right. Madison’s always goin’ on about big families and such. Makes you think she’s gonna have ten kids when the right man comes along.”

“Oh, hush up Nor.”

Mrs. Frost smiles and finishes the rest of the tour, shows them the little backyard, but doesn’t take them upstairs herself--”I don’t move quite how I used to”--so they go up alone. There are two bedrooms with a look of having gone undisturbed for a long time. The twin beds in the second room have the hardest mattresses they’ve ever felt--they sit, gauging its give, and realize there is none.

Nora traces a thumb over a wedding picture on the desk in the corner, finds Mrs. Frost standing next to a tall man with thinning white hair and a big belly to the right of a young couple in their late twenties. And Natasha says, “I wonder which one is her grandchild.” She stares, gaze falling on each face in the faded photograph, and her mouth twists slightly with each bit of eye contact she makes across the gap of time.

“We don’t have to stay,” Maria says quietly.

Madison and Nora thank the old woman and tell her they’ll be in touch. They have a few more places to see before they make a final decision, of course, of course. Mrs. Frost insists on giving them both a hug, insists they let her know if they’re in the area again--because maybe her family will be in town, and her stepson makes this incredible food that would certainly remind them of home.

Madison and Nora fall apart before they pull out of the driveway, and Maria pauses at the top of the neighborhood before the main road. “What’s wrong, Nat?”

“This didn’t used to be hard,” she murmurs into her hand, looking anywhere else but the driver’s seat. “Let’s just go, okay?”

* * *

 

There wasn’t any place in particular they had decided to go, so when Maria hopped on the first sign to the interstate she didn’t pay attention to the signs laying out the surroundings until it was 1 am and they were in the middle of a great plot of nowhere in Arkansas. There had been a sign welcoming them to Romance. Perhaps it was appropriate, or maybe, at that point, it was simply ironic. Natasha hadn’t said a word since they passed through Birmingham, and it was only because she had been hungry.

The first place to stay that they found was a hunting resort south in Mt. Vernon, and the lone camo-clad patrons still up at that hour eyed them curiously from their seats in the lobby.

One pointed look from Natasha sent them scurrying back to their discussion about quail and Jack Daniels.

“You know,” Maria said once they got up to their room. “I saw signs about an archery range. We should tell Clint about this place.”

“He’d only embarrass everyone else.”

“Exactly.”

A grin tugged at the corners of Natasha’s lips but she still didn’t look up from her suitcase--she had pulled out her cell phone, the battery symbol in the corner red with low juice and the screen showing far too many unread text messages for her to throw it nonchalantly back into her clothes pile like she did. “Steve likes to send me daily updates from his and Sam’s search for Barnes. Most of them just say ‘nothing yet,’ or ‘lost the trail again.’ If he finds anything substantial he always leaves a voicemail.”

“How often is that?”

Natasha dug through a layer of jeans to find her toiletries bag. “Twice, so far.”

Maria watched her shuffle to the bathroom and pause momentarily at the bland hotel art next to the closet door--dry grass fields and a goose taking flight in earthy colors that muted themselves so close to Natasha’s hair like they knew they weren’t worthy. Mass-produced, left alone in the great vast expanse of a state people forget they’ve forgotten. It should have bowed out of the way; the miracle was that it didn’t. Maria almost had to squint against the contrast.

“I don’t know if this was a good idea,” Natasha said suddenly. “I--I thought it was, but.”

“It’s okay.”

“It’s not.” The toiletries bag fell unceremoniously to the floor, little travel-sized bottles of toothpaste and lip balm tumbling to roll under the scratched dresser, and before Maria even knew what was happening, Natasha’s hands were on either side of her face and there was an intensity to her stare that almost physically hurt. “It’s not okay. Because. Finding a cover isn’t just a mask. It’s the skin underneath. Right now I’m Natasha Romanoff, but before I was Natalia Romanova. And before I didn’t know what my name was or--or what my parents named me, but I have to leave it all behind and I should have never agreed to you doing the same to yourself.” She kissed her, lightly, barely there, and when she pulled away, Maria thought she saw a small bulb of tears along her eyes. “You have no reason to,” she added softly.

“Like hell.” She leaned in, a plan to kiss the doubt from her, to wick it away with her tongue, and to push every reason she had to follow her onto this unlit path into every inch of her skin she could touch, but Natasha stepped back. Shook her head. There was an unfamiliar sheen of tears starting to creep into her eyes.

“I--well. I lied, you know.” She wouldn’t look at Maria suddenly, the worn carpet under their boots, that generic swirl of beaten-down shag easier to face. “I didn’t know if I was coming back.”

“Natasha--”

“Everyone knew too much that they didn’t need to know,” she whispered. “I don’t regret it, putting that information out there. But I still have to live with it. They still have to live with knowing that about me.”

Maria tipped Natasha’s face up gently, brought her lips to her own and tried, tried to--she didn’t know what. But as she let Natasha slowly collapse into her arms, a small sob of relief choked in the small space between them, she thought about all Natasha didn’t know. The email thread with Banner from his spotty internet in Rangoon. The unexpected Asgardian missives that would appear in the kitchen in the middle of the night, seemingly from nowhere. The background shouting from Stark when she would have her weekly phone call with Pepper. They were living just fine; hell, they respected her even more than they had.

_You can put the boulder down. No one said you had to be Atlas. I’ll help you carry it. I’ll help you smash it it to bits._

She cradled Natasha’s head against her chest that night and counted the spaces between her breaths to be sure she wasn’t merely pretending to be asleep, even though it was a difficult difference to discern. Only during their fifth mission assigned to the same team could Maria even begin to tell, and it had been that mission, the mission where they were rocketing down E35 south from Quito at midnight, Maria behind the wheel and Natasha watching their six with her pistol pointed at the back windshield. That mission, where they made the drop-off at the consulate in Guayaquil and waited for their extraction by the lighthouse in Las Peñas. The sun had risen over the river and cast long shadows over the colorful houses dotting the steep hills around them. And Natasha had leaned against Maria’s shoulder to sleep, and maybe she had been asleep at one point, but not even the best of agents know how to weave their fingers with another’s while unconscious.

Morning announced itself with the slit of sunlight peeking through the gap in the curtains and banding across their faces, and Natasha was already blinking slowly up at Maria when she turned her head to check on her. “Let’s go home,” she said into her shoulder.

“Did you find your cover, or--”

“No.” She wriggled up to kiss behind her ear and touch her nose to her temple. “I don’t...I don’t think I--” She sighed, and the sun sparked over streaks of her natural highlights, the reflection catching in Maria’s throat, her chest, each knob of her spine. “I like who I am with you.”  


End file.
